It feels like every few weeks i see an article about microplastics being in the human body. As i understand plastics are inert so why do we expect them to be any more harmful than normal dust?
In: Biology
They are pretty much in anyone”s body at this point and we know little about their effects.
So there is a “gold rush” among the scientific community to be the first ones to find something about them.
We don’t know much about what microplastics do in the body, and yet they’re everywhere. We’re starting to learn some potential negative effects, but we largely just don’t know, kinda troubling
Micro plastics can be a vector for other contaminants. Other stuff that contaminates the same waterway can adsorb to the plastic and be transported with it. This can cause people to consume other bad stuff that is stuck to the plastics.
There is a lot of fear and concern about them, as you can see from the many responses on this thread. I am not too concerned yet, for a few reasons.
1) Despite microplastics being ubiquitous, we have little evidence of major health trends at a population level. The comparative analogy is tobacco. Everyone who uses tobacco at a high rate is highly likely to suffer health impacts as a result. We haven’t seen that trend from microplastics yet, despite their ubiquity.
2) We also haven’t seen comparable trends in wildlife, which are being exposed to the same contaminated environment as we are. Many animals have different vulnerabilities to contaminants, but it is noteworthy that there isn’t a massive cancer wave in, say, freshwater fish.
3) Despite the press about microplastics being ubiquitous in the human body in particular, the studies demonstrating this result often do not fully explain their blanks and quality control of their analyses. Most just say that their blanks (if they used any) were clean. They don’t actually provide example data or images supporting that. Given the popular fear around microplastics, along with the extreme publish or perish nature of academia, it is not impossible that some of this is a bit overblown
I’m not going to commit to believing that necessarily, but it does give me pause. As others have noted, the human body (and all animal bodies) are very robust to particulate contamination. We breathe in dust and other particles constantly, and ingest them constantly, and most do not pass through our mucus membranes. The exceptions like asbestos and silicosis occur from the mucus membranes being continually irritated and scarred from physical damage. That certainly could be happening, but I would expect us to be seeing a population-level trend of it by now.
Should we be concerned? Absolutely. Should we reduce plastic use as much as possible? Absolutely. Should we panic that we are all going to die? I’m not certain.
It could end up killing more people than nuclear radiation. We just dont know the long term health effects of it yet, nor do we have ways to combat it.
I’m not informed on the inertness of it but it’s like having tiny bits of anything in your bloodstream. It can be incredibly harmful to one person and not affect another. If we keep using them I’m sure that eventually human body’s will find a way to break it down and excrete it or use it but right now it looks like it will just cost an enormous amount of human lives.
Plastics are useful tools which are chemically inert.
So are knives.
If they get in the wrong place, both can cause bad things.
Just b/c something is “inert” doesn’t mean it’s harmless. I can make a spear from an inert substance, and kill you with it by stabbing you through the heart.
Like another poster said, silica dust is also “inert”. But it gets in your alveoli and stabs them. This eventually suffocates you, and you die.
We don’t know anything about microplastics, and we have no choice about getting in our bodies. Problems like this, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, suggest regulatory control is needed.
Microplastics are concerning because of their pervasiveness. We’ve done enough research to demonstrate that there is a HIGH concentration of microplastics in our bodies, water, and environment. The high concentration of microplastics found are related to our societal reliance on plastics, as well as the fact that plastics don’t degrade – they just break down into smaller and smaller plastic particles (nanoplastics). While the exact health effects from microplastics in our bodies are still being researched, it would make sense that it would not be good to have tons of tiny particles building up in our bodies (there are already some works suggesting that). Beyond that, recent research has indicated that microplastics can be messengers for other contaminants, because some plastic types have a high affinity for adsorbing toxic substances in the environment.
Studies show it could reduce the taint size in Male mammals, which is important for reproduction. Essentially a worst case scenario is microplastics make us sterile and turn men into genderless weirdos
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